Z-Town

The Sphinx challenges Oedipus on the road to Thebes. A pile of bones of previous victims underscore the severity of the task.

Children of the dawn : old tales of Greece. 1908. Illustrated by Franklin Paper.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to disease prevention and control.

Why is measles back in America?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including RFK Jr, cut vaccine and measles prevention funding and programs.

Why is the New World Screwworm infecting cattle in Texas, when it had previously been eliminated from the area?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Elon Musk, cut USAID funding, which in part worked to monitor and prevent screwworm outbreaks.

Why was there a flu outbreak in our armed forces?

Because Donald Trump and his Republican allies, including Pete Hegseth, cut vaccination requirements for our armed forces, putting all of them at risk alongside our military readiness.

What contributed to the Covid outbreak?

Donald Trump and his Republican allies cut funding to a pandemic prevention program in his first term because Barack Obama had created it.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

“Today, the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications (“Chat Control 1.0”) to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March.

Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes.

As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028.”

“A symbolic exemption was adopted for encrypted communications—though in practice, service providers do not scan these anyway.

Furthermore, while a majority of voting MEPs wanted to restrict the scanning of private communications strictly to suspects identified by the judiciary (322 to 255 votes), this amendment likewise fell short of the required absolute majority.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, civil rights activist and former Member of the European Parliament (MEP), warns of the consequences: “The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy. Our children are the real losers in this undemocratic process.

The passage of a genuine, permanent child protection regulation is now in serious jeopardy. The Council will never agree to a desperately needed paradigm shift as long as they can simply stick to the old approach of suspicionless scanning at the whim of the tech industry.”

Despite the legislative defeat, Breyer remains defiant regarding the upcoming negotiations: “Today’s vote on the interim regulation was a setback, but the political battle over the permanent ‘Chat Control 2.0’ is just getting started.

The resistance we saw in Parliament today was so strong that finding a majority for permanent, suspicionless mass scanning in future negotiations is a complete pipe dream.”

what’s next?

“The interim regulation passed today will remain in effect until 2028, or until an agreement on a permanent regulation is reached. Negotiations for the permanent law will resume in September.

The core dispute between the EU Parliament, member state governments, and the EU Commission remains the scanning of private chats: should it be indiscriminate, or targeted at criminal suspects?”

“Talk of averting a “protection gap” is therefore highly misleading.

The most effective law enforcement tools—court-ordered wiretaps, user reports, and the scanning of public platforms and cloud storage—were never at risk and remain fully intact.

The only practice that was temporarily banned since April was the indiscriminate, warrantless searching of private, unencrypted messages of innocent people on a handful of US platforms.”

talks over permanent

“In parallel, negotiations are ongoing for a permanent regulation to protect children from sexualized online violence (the “CSAM Regulation” or “Chat Control 2.0”)

In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding:

Mandatory, targeted detection orders against actual criminal suspects, rather than blanket mass scanning left to the tech industry’s discretion.

An EU Child Protection Centre tasked with the systematic removal of known abuse material from the public internet.

Strict security standards for messaging apps (“Security by Design”) to prevent cyber grooming.”

This permanent legislation has stalled because EU member states insist on maintaining the outdated approach of voluntary, suspicionless scanning of private communications.

Critics warn that repeatedly extending the interim rules removes the political pressure needed to reach a viable, permanent agreement.

Ultimately, clinging to the status quo threatens to derail real progress on child protection.

Patrick Breyer sums up the problem: “As long as EU governments can use procedural loopholes to continually extend their comfortable status quo of voluntary, indiscriminate mass scanning, they have zero incentive to engage with the Parliament’s targeted, legally sound, and far more effective child protection strategy.

“The Voices of Survivors: “We need privacy to bring abusers to justice”

Survivors of sexual violence explicitly emphasize that untargeted Chat Control did not help victims:

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.